Whence came this unshakable certainty among too-far right-wingers in a complex of notions which, to them, seems so self-evident as to need no test?–a socio-political and psychological complex so deep in themselves they cannot grasp its dimensions, sources or fallibility?–a complex they cannot analyze correctly in relation to other political ideas and attitudes because, though secular, they believe in it “religiously” the way Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in monotheism, no matter how variously they understand or misunderstand it?
This complex of belief and feeling has so deep a hold on far rightists that few of them can aptly describe it or understand opposition. They imagine their enemies are straw-men kicked apart easily, no matter that opponents stay untouched. Far rightists typically know too little history and political science to sense their own real affinities and origins. The few who know are committed to their elite sort of madness as are fundamentalists to literal interpretation. (For instance, the late Ayn Rand or the revivalist, Billy Sunday. Compared to such reactionary and inbred thought-ways, liberal understanding steps outside any one-book scope and gathers information.)
The taproot of elite, upper-crust conservatism starts in the 16th and 17th centuries with the final flare-up of The Divine Right of Kings. Kingly right was assumed in the early and late Middle Ages, as part of The Great Chain of Being in which everything and everyone had a place. Each served the world and itself best by staying in that place. Church and State were agreed on this and mutually supported each other. But, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, questionings began which by the start of the 18th century brought about both the Age of Reason among philosophers and the final, most drastic, dogmatic flare-up of divine rights in the mind of Louis Fourteenth, trailing on through Louis Sixteenth & Seventeenth, the French Revolution and Napoleonic coup. Napoleon tried to reinstate the notion. His defeat triggered its decline and demise.
This describes only the taproot. Other “feeder” roots were added through the 18th and 19th centuries, during which the taproot grew obscured from view. Religious reaction to Voltaire and the Encyclopedists fed the elite attitude, followed by reactions against Darwin, Marx and Freud, by which time the elite had become upper-middle class and lost its feeling of connection with nobles and royalty. The feeling remained but subsided into the unconscious where it remains among our wealthiest elites to this day.
Many ordinary folks emulate the elite and copy their outlook unconsciously through a process called ‘mimesis’ or subliminal absorption. Appropriating an identity not their own in this way, the combined Ultra-right, of wealthy folks with their following of imitators, simply cannot conceive how emotionally fraudulent and disconnected they are. Mixed with such attitudes are anti-social impulses of an untempered egoism that pathologically lacks empathy for others felt different or lacking. The image fitting this outlook is that of a head without hands or feet, which must be carried and served. The far-right puts on a compensatory mask of hard-working, self-sufficient superiority. Inside that self-idealizing mask is conceptual rigidity and moral poverty.
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